Open Access

Popular commercial video games see millions of people around the world immersed in wondrous landscapes, many filled with real geological features including volcanoes, mineral deposits, and dinosaurs. Even though these features can be overlooked by many players as simple video game tropes, if utilized in educational environments or scientific outreach events, video games have the potential to encourage and stimulate teaching of geoscientific concepts, both in the classroom or in their own time. Pokémon Legends: Arceus is set in a fictional landscape, Hisui, that is directly based on the real-world island of Hokkaido, northern Japan. This paper demonstrates that a single commercial video game can be used to explore a variety of geological and geomorphological concepts including volcanology, economic geology, and hazard mitigation, with direct real-world examples to support the geoscientific understanding.

The latest featured article in our ongoing project to bring more of the academic work around the Pokémon franchise and/or fandom to the attention of the broader Pokémon community, focuses on the use of sophisticated specialized language in player-written guides for Pokémon GO, and discusses several interesting implications for literacy and classroom learning.

With Twitch Plays Pokémon having been featured in the recent Catch a Million to Conquer Kids’ Cancer charity event in support of St. Baldrick's Foundation, we thought now might be a good time to share some recent research relating to the Twitch Plays Pokémon phenomenon. Our latest featured article for this series comes from Jenny Saucerman & Dennis Ramirez, both from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Both authors completed their PhDs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, studying Curriculum and Instruction with a focus on digital media. Jenny Saucerman's work primarily focuses on gender and STEM, gender and gaming, and Pokémon. She was one of the winners of Xbox’s Women in Gaming Award at the 2015 Game Developers’ Conference. Dennis Ramirez research has focused on evaluation of educational games. He has over a decade of experience making games professionally and independently, working with groups including OLPC, NIH, NSF, and the DoD.

With Twitch Plays Pokémon slated to feature in the upcoming Catch a Million to Conquer Kids’ Cancer charity event in support of St. Baldrick's Foundation, we thought now might be a good time to share some recent research relating to the Twitch Plays Pokémon phenomenon. This article article from our Open Access series comes from Argyrios "Aris" Emmanouloudis, who completed his PhD on online communities and video game fandom at the University of Amsterdam, and until recently was the Games Programme Coordinator at SAE Institute Amsterdam. This short paper, which presents a case study on the Twitch Plays Pokémon community, was originally presented at FanLIS 2021, an interdisciplinary academic conference which brings together researchers from fandom, fan studies, and library and information science.

Every year, a substantial amount of academic research is published about, or with some connection to, the Pokémon franchise and/or fandom. While occasionally some of this research breaks through to the fandom and/or to mainstream news, much of this research sadly goes underreported, and unread by the wider community of Pokémon fans. We here at Bulbagarden think it's about time that changed. Our second featured article for this series uses made-up Pokémon names to explore the sensitivity of Brazilian Portuguese speakers to sound symbolic associations. As you may be aware, Nintendo recently released a game in Brazilian Portuguese for the very first time, leading to a growing fan movement to encourage Nintendo to release more games in Brazilian Portuguese. It's our hope that, in featuring this work, we might be able to help that cause by keeping the issue alive in the linguistics community.

Every year, a substantial amount of academic research is published about, or with some connection to, the Pokémon franchise and/or fandom. While occasionally some of this research breaks through to the fandom and/or to mainstream news, much of this research sadly goes underreported, and unread by the wider community of Pokémon fans. We here at Bulbagarden think it's about time that changed. Our first featured article comes from a multinational team of researchers, whose study takes an extensive look at how climate change will impact the existence of suitable habitat for Kangaskhan. Dr. Dan L. Warren, the lead author of the study, noted the primary reason for choosing to use a Pokémon character in their research was to engage a broader audience with the issues conservation scientists regularly need to think about. We think that's a wonderful idea, and it's why we've chosen this article specifically to be our first featured article with this project.